I didn't say they're living well. Gaza is not and never has been a wealthy area (Arabs without oil), although I hear it has a fancy new shopping mall and a water park. If you have complaints against the state of the population perhaps you should direct them to the government in charge, who is doing very little to improve living conditions there? In any case my point was that they do have food there, and the situation is in no way comparable to the Nazi concentration camps.

Quite well, in fact. I hear the obesity rate there is almost as high as the US. Apparently Israel is doing a terrible job at starving them..

Well then, where are the Egyptian start-ups?

The biggest problem with the question posed by this article is that even if I had a time machine and could meet myself when I started programming, I'd have a hard time selling "The C Programming Language" to my 5 year old self. Seriously, most of us started programming as kids, and we did it for fun. Reading long books is no fun, and CS theory is seriously no fun at all.

Personally I started with "Inside ATARI Basic" by Bill Carris. It was a very fun read and was definitely aimed at kids and beginner adults. Unfortunately my walk through the book came to a screeching halt when trying to understand what FOR and NEXT did. The book explained that FOR and NEXT are like the two parts of an Oreo cookie, and the code in between them was like the cream in the middle. Mmmmm, Oreo cookies. Yum! But what does it actually do? No explanation at all. At that point I gave up on BASIC and moved to LOGO. It was only 5 years later that it was explained to me that FOR-NEXT was a loop structure, which is what broke the barriers for me and allowed me to move from BASIC to Assembly, then (much later on) on to Java, C and C++.

But I digress. My main point here is that nobody starts programming by reading Knuth cover to cover and then digging in, and that most of the "must read" and influential books on the subject make no sense to the beginner.

Associated Presses. (ok, ok. Access Points.)

Don't joke. These things are smaller than a VHS tape and can store *two* movies!

1. Get a Comfy keyboard.
2. Remove baby stickers.
3. Attach to USB port.

Voila, a foot keyboard for $80.

The better explanation is this: That's no sun. It's the moon! If you take a long exposure shot on a moonlit night, the sky will be blue and the land will appear sunlit, but there will be stars visible in the sky - just like in this video. Occasionally the moon itself is visible as a very bright spot. Note that when the sun rises the shot becomes completely overexposed, and that's why several scenes end with everything washing out and becoming white.

Not sure about the 6502 in general, but the version used in Atari computers actually does have a (thankfully well hidden!) Self Destruct Vector. As the machine reached the end of its commercial life, Atari Corp. released the access procedure, perhaps as a sort of farewell present.

A program demonstrating its use was released, with full source code, in ANALOG computing's April 1986 issue (article here). It was aptly named "Paperweight". You can download binaries from the net but I'd rather not give a link here for obvious reasons. However, for those curious to see what a typical execution (note the humorous pun!) looks like, it's on youtube.

Oh, it works very well on an emulator! Not sure if this simulator could do it though, I doubt they have a rising smoke effect in the javascript...

;)

How many laptop thieves give a crap about the information in the machine? In 99% of the cases all they want is to sell it, as quickly as possible.

Why would that be a mispronounciation? That's how it was originally intended to be pronounced. It's everybody else who's got it wrong :)

Whomever posted this story really took their time...

Don't Panic!